Test drive: Nissan's electric family car

The prototype of Nissan's forthcoming electric car may look like a breadbin, but the technology beneath that boxy body could propel the Japanese automaker to the front of the electric pack when the car rolls onto the road next year.

Nissan may be a small player compared to the likes of General Motors, Toyota and Honda, but it's probably the most committed to electric cars. Carlos Ghosn, the CEO, has said in no uncertain terms that cars with cords are the future of the automobile, and he's backed that up with an all-in bet on a practical, affordable hatchback with decent range, reasonable recharge time and room for five people. Oh, and Nissan says it'll cost less than £1 to charge.

"It's a real car with 100-mile range," said Mark Perry, Nissan's director of product planning. "We may not be the first to market with an EV, but we'll be the first to mass-market an EV."

"Nissan could end up being the come-from-behind leader in the EV space because Carlos Ghosn has pushed them so aggressively," said Darryl Siry, an electric car expert and clean tech analyst at Peppercom. "Nissan is making moves that could make it the major mass-market EV player among the established automakers."

Nissan took the prototype to the Wired.com offices in San Francisco and let us take it for a spin.

The car that will be in showrooms across the US by the end of 2010 won't look like the prototype, which is a Cube city car fitted with an electric motor and lithium-ion battery pack. The as-yet-unnamed car slated for production will be a five-door hatchback based on a "heavily modified" Versa chassis. Perry wouldn't give us any hints about what the production model will look like, but he promised it will be distinctive - yet restrained.

"We want it to be iconic," he said. "We want people to look at it and know it's an EV [electric vehicle]. But we want it to be a real car. It can't be strange."

The test drive was limited to a half-mile loop around a big parking lot near San Francisco Bay, so we can't offer a definitive assessment. We can tell you that the drivetrain offered brisk acceleration, a hallmark of electric motors, which offer great torque, and that the car felt nimble. Everything about it felt like we'd just driven it off the showroom floor.

"The performance is 99 percent there," Perry said of drivetrain development. "This is essentially what we're going to launch with."

And though the electro-Cube we tooled around in was relatively spartan, Perry says the production model will be top-shelf.

"We're building this car for consumers," he said. "It will have navi. It will have stereo. It will have A/C and power seats. All the things you want and expect will be in this car."

The car will use a lithium-ion battery pack that Perry says will recharge in four hours if you plug it into a 220 volt socket. If you've got a 440 volt line - and Perry says many businesses do - you can get an 80 percent charge in just 26 minutes.

Perry wouldn't say anything at all about the car's specs, but Siry said the 100-mile range suggests the car will have a 20-kilowatt battery. As for those recharge times, Siry said: "All those numbers make sense. They're about right."

So what's it gonna cost? Perry wouldn't give us a specific figure but said it will be comparable to Nissan's family hatchbacks.

Perry said the car won't carry the price premium often found on hybrids because Nissan wants to make it as affordable as possible. "We're going for volume," he said. "We're targeting the mass market and mass sales."

What kind of volume? Perry said the goal is an initial run of as many as 10,000 cars when the car goes on sale in 15 markets across the US. Production will ramp up from there, with worldwide sales by 2012. Perry says the forthcoming model will be part of a portfolio of electric cars Nissan will offer in the years to come.

And all of those cars will need somewhere to plug in when they aren't in driveways, so Nissan is working with utility companies and local, state and national governments (United States, Japan, Israel and several European countries including the UK) to develop public charging infrastructure.

Edited by Mike Hills

Comments

Excellent stuff but perhaps not the future? Certainly electric is very good but small city cars lke the MyCar from Hong Kong (and launched in London by evstores) seem to make much more sense. Most of our journeys are very short and at a low speed. We can use small ev's now. No need to wait for the large car manufacturers!